LUCIDMEDIA

Elvira Bites Back

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Thursday, 03 September 2009 14:29

Elvira Kurt puts down her penchant for being funny partially to her cultural heritage.

The Gemini-nominated comedienne says her predilection toward dark humour comes at least partly from her Hungarian background. “It’s comforting to know I’m not alone,” she says of people relating to her unique brand of funny, “that the world is huge.”

Of her fellow Magyars, she says “[They’re] people with a built-in expectation for doom… that thread [gets] inadvertently handed down and passed on. My parents had their own extreme negativity, so it’s no surprise it’s a slant I give to my work. It’s not a conscious thought. I only hear it from the audience: “It’s really evil, just evil!” -but that’s how I think.”

Kurt’s unique, darkly humorous way of thinking has made her a household name in Canada, with regular appearances at Just For Laughs and a weekly gig on CBC Radio’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. She also had a television show, Popcultured!, that aired from 2005 to 2006. In addition, she’s performed on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, and her comedy specials have aired on networks as specialized as Comedy Central and The Comedy Network to as broad as CBC, CTV, HBO and Showtime. A regular in Las Vegas and across the North American campus circuit, Kurt also starred in Elvira Kurt: Adventures in Comedy for The Comedy Network and has acted in productions of The Vagina Monologues.

In addition to keeping a busy live schedule, she performed alongside friend Gavin Crawford at this past June’s Pride festivities in Toronto. This month, she’ll be hosting an evening in honour of New Zealand musical/comedy (and yodeling) duo The Topp Twins, whose film, Spotlighting The Topp Twins, will be running as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Her witty, irreverent style is funny, cutting, and frequently insightful, and her topics often include politics, lifestyle, parenting, celebrity and gender issues, all filtered through Kurt’s unique perception and sharp delivery.

“My goal is to be as honest as I can,” she says of stand-up. “I’m in a roomful of strangers, and I am well aware there’s an intimacy going on … part of [what] makes doing it interesting is, how can I be authentic about this? I can say something that’s funny, but not a distortion or a slight exaggeration, but if it’s an exaggeration, the starting point is from a real place. It’s for comedic effect –there’s a grain of truth, and that’s how I like it, that’s what works best for me… that appeals to me and to the audience.”

Audience is something she can’t see when she’s on the radio, however. Kurt does a weekly segment on the arts program Q, broadcast on CBC Radio One weekday mornings called the Cultural Hall of Shame. It’s an amusing, fun piece of radio during which she banters with host Jian Ghomeshi, and covers a range of topics making news in the cultural world –everything from pop culture to high culture gets a thorough raking over when Kurt takes the microphone.

“There are times when I’m writing the bits which I plan to talk about with Jian and it’s the bare bones,” she says. “So much of what makes something work is how he responds. Sometimes writing… some weeks are easier than others. Other weeks there’s effort.”

She explains how performing live affects and informs what she delivers on the radio –it’s a slightly kinder, gentler version of Kurt, but not by much. “When it’s slow, there’s a joke I could try onstage –in fact, one more than once I have –so I will try it. The jokes are not things I would come up with from my act. It seems a little out of context, but it’s gratifying to have it work.”

Kurt’s strength is the diversity of her talent. She’s able to gear her humour to a lot of different audiences, crossing perceived barriers of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. But she puts her success down to the fact that she hasn’t compromised who she is or what she believes. Risk, she says, is an inherent part of work. “If I’m trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn’t have lasted,” she confesses. “Something has to be at stake, well, so I’m going to risk being as honest as I can be… we’ll see if it’s funny. To be up there and talk about being disappointed with my own choices, I always think, ‘Really? I couldn’t talk about sparkle ponies?’ That’s easy, it doesn’t make people think about their own stuff, so I’m trying to find humour in that thing that we all kind of deal with privately.”

One of those private things is parenting. In a past appearance at Montreal’s esteemed Just For Laughs Festival, Kurt bemoaned the coddling of contemporary children, noting that when she was growing up, playgrounds were akin to pits of doom. “Steel beams embedded into cement!” is how she put it (in a thundering voice, no less), before launching into a hilarious impression of playground kids urging a peer to go “go higher… go higher… jump!” Such observations are particularly interesting now that Kurt is a parent herself. She and her partner welcomed their second child earlier this year.

“It’s definitely changed my outlook,” she says of being a parent, “but it hasn’t made my comedy any less stark or edgy. But now I’m unable to watch TV shows or films or listen to subject matter has to do with the suffering of children in any way. You turn on CSI and see the body is a kid, and… that’s it, I can’t watch it, it’s back to the cooking channel. In that way, I’ve become more sensitive.”

Kurt clarifies what she means by her leaning toward the bleak side with parenting. “Things about leaving her on the top of the fridge (Kurt’s daughter),” she says with a little giggle. “or something I’ll be off-handedly mentioning. It’s obviously a joke, no one would leave a baby on top of a fridge, but for a laugh I would, in my mind, take in the reaction. I’m so sensitive to how a crowd is reacting, it hits me that way when it’s gone too far. I backtrack or I’ve learned to set that kind of thing up properly.”

Kurt emphasizes that she wants to enjoy the “moment” of being a parent of small children, so she’s delayed making any direct references to her parenting adventures, though that doesn’t mean joking about parenting is entirely off-limits, either. “When I did,” she says of sharing observations during stand-up routines, “it was bleak, it was dark –it’s still stuff I have to clarify (in terms of) where this comes from… it’s Eastern European.”

Ah yes, the famous Hungarian bleakness. So will her kids be seeing her stand-up routine? Or does she fear it might be a bit too dark for them?

“My oldest is three-and-a-half –she knows I do shows, but she has no idea what she thinks a show is. She knows I tell jokes, but doesn’t understand any of that. It’s so sweet if she wakes up and I haven’t put her to sleep –she’s seen me get dressed, makes sure my outfit is okay, then later she wakes up and asks, “Good show?” She just knows I’ve been to a show... “

She lets out a hearty laugh. “We’ll see,” is her response to the suggestion of eventually bringing her kids to see her live routine. She just hopes it doesn’t influence their career choices though. “Eventually, I’d like her to have more self-esteem than to choose stand-up for a living.”

Where she does hope to make a difference as a parent is through instilling the kind of gender-balanced approach she brings to her own material, though she acknowledges the comedy world is still full of barriers when it comes to women being on par with men. Kurt says she’s disappointed at the status quo, and at the fact that so much of the stand-up world is filled with humour celebrating man-child culture at the expense of denigrating women, and frequently reducing them to sexual stereotypes.

“If there was a parallel universe and matriarchy was dominant as opposed to patriarchy, I wonder how many guys who are successful at that sort of humour, from their point of view, would be validated. Knowing that there is an alternative, where I’m coming from is potentially an alternative, it has to be an alternative and not just on the continuum of the mainstream. What’s mainstream is not universally thought of that way.” She pauses, and observes that the variation in human experience is reflected in the world of stand-up: “One thing about comedy: one type doesn’t suit everyone’s taste.”

But at the same time, Kurt is a smart enough performer –and woman –to acknowledge the inequity at play within the stand-up world. “There is a majority that seems to carry most of the weight,” she observes, “and it’s discouraging to think it’s always going to be that way. You’ll always be in the slot of a niche, a parallel universe, topsy-turvy. When you are the mainstream or white or privileged, it would never occur to you there’s another way, it’s not part of your consciousness. It’s easier for me than a black lesbian or straight black woman –I’m white and can pass.”

Kurt, who openly announces she is a lesbian (but avoids falling into tired clichés in live routines), says when she comes out to audiences, she’s sometimes surprised by the reaction –and not in the way you might think. “People think I’m a soccer mom, which is astounding to me.”

Still, put it down to Kurt’s indomitable spirit that she refuses to be held down by traditional barriers or notions. She’s just staying grateful. “I get that I’m certainly not someone who’s been marginalized in any way other than talking about successful male comics –gender for sure, feel disappointed more than anything, but there’s no point in being frustrated. Just suck it up… and back to the salt mine. When I’m doing a show, and it’s going well, I never think about (that), I just think, ‘this is the best job ever…’ I stop and it just is what it is, I’m grateful for that. I like to get that, to hear laughter, I feel like I touched a common nerve.”